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Experience What Happens When JOY Meets PURPOSE

What Does It Look like When Students Make Learning Tangible?

Each spring, McDonogh's STEM Fair fills the Fader Innovation Center with research posters, engineered prototypes, and student-led presentations. It's the payoff of a coordinated path that runs from CAD and robotics in the Lower School to a senior capstone tackling real community challenges. Students don't restart their learning each year — they advance it.

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What Happens When a Seventh Grade Science Unit Ends with Something Living in the Chesapeake Bay?

As part of their study of oysters, McDonogh seventh graders partnered with the Coastal Conservation Association of Maryland to build oyster reef balls — concrete structures that give oyster spat a surface to attach and grow. Once placed in local waterways, the reef balls will help restore oyster populations, improve water quality, and create habitat for other marine life.

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What Happens When a Third Grader's Research Project Has a Real Audience Waiting?

Through a partnership with the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore's Signature Species Conservation Program, McDonogh third graders spent the year studying four endangered animals to understand why they're at risk and what can be done to protect them. They turned that research into posters and pamphlets, then stood alongside Zoo educators, making the case to visitors for why these species are worth saving.

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Here, Inquiry Ignites Excellence

Intellectual rigor and genuine joy aren't opposites — they're partners. Combine them, and the results are transformational.

McDonogh students and graduates are prepared to think deeply, ask insightful questions, solve real-world problems, innovate, and lead with purpose in a diverse, ever-changing world.

LifeReady Learning Exceptional Academics Impactful Outcomes

Greatest Good McDonogh

With meaningful programming integrated into the curriculum in every division, Greatest Good McDonogh cultivates empathetic leaders who realize their power and potential to do the greatest good in the world.

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800-Acre Labs

800-Acre Labs draws on McDonogh's fields, streams, woods, and ponds as living classrooms, offering students transformative experiences in environmental and agricultural science across our campus's natural ecosystems.

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Civics, Ethics, and Leadership

Our graduates are taught how to think — not what to think — and emerge as self-reliant, critical thinkers who can form, test, and revise their ideas, for themselves and in service to others in a diverse, ever-changing world.

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We provide young people with life-altering educational experiences that demand civil discourse, inspire personal and intellectual growth, and foster a commitment to do the greatest possible amount of good.

Dave Farace '87, Head of School